Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Quotes

6 Life Lessons From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Don't panic: we're honoring Towel Day, a celebration of the life and work of Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. The author of the science-fiction cult classic (lovingly referred to as H2G2 by fans the world over) was born on this day in Cambridge, England, and grew up to be one of the greatest, most quotable geek heroes of all time.

In his all-encompassing electronic travel guide, Douglas teaches interstellar hitchhikers about the secrets of life, the universe, and everything in between. In what follows, we've gathered the author's six most compelling life lessons from the book — because 4 + 2 = 6, and we all know that 42 is the answer to everything.

If we didn't include your favorite quote from H2G2, then tell us what it is in the comments!

If we are going to inhabit this Universe, then there is one thing we must do: think small (which is why, perhaps, the all-encompassing reference of wisdom, also known as the Hitchhiker's Guide was not published on Earth.)

"If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."

Keep calm and move about the galaxy. The two opening words of the Hitchhiker's Guide, and the inscription of the phrase on the guide's cover is the second reason why it has replaced the Encyclopaedia Galactica as the "standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom."

Of why Douglas Adams chose 42, the answer to the ultimate question calculated over a period of 7.2 million years, the author answered, "The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story."

It's a grave reminder that there is no absolute answer, and that one-size-fits-all responses are trivial.

A new hyperspace bypass was the very reason the alien race intended to destroy Earth.

The Hitchhiker's Guide suggests that, in the end, the disadvantages of making room for high-speed transport outweigh the advantages:

"The disadvantages [of cars] involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another — particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish."